Some people call it stream processing. Others call it Event Sourcing or CQRS. Some even call it Complex Event Processing. Sometimes, such self-important buzzwords are just smoke and mirrors, invented by companies who want to sell you stuff. But sometimes, they contain a kernel of wisdom which can really help us design better systems.

In this talk, we will go in search of the wisdom behind the buzzwords. We will discuss how event streams can help make your application more scalable, more reliable and more maintainable. Founded in the experience of building large-scale data systems at LinkedIn, and implemented in open source projects like Apache Kafka and Apache Samza, stream processing is finally coming of age.

In this presentation, I’m going to discuss some of the ideas that people have about processing event streams. The idea…

I was speaking at a conference last year on the topics of DevOps, Configuration as Code, and Continuous Delivery and used the following story to demonstrate the importance making deployments fully automated and repeatable as part of a DevOps/Continuous Delivery initiative. Since that conference I have been asked by several people to share the story through my blog. This story is true – this really happened. This is my telling of the story based on what I have read (I was not involved in this).

This is the story of how a company with nearly $400 million in assets went bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment.

Background

Knight Capital Group is an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. In 2012 Knight was the largest trader in US equities with market share of around 17% on each the…

Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. At the time Dr. Stuhlinger was Associate Director for Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. Touched by Sister Mary’s concern and sincerity, his beliefs about the value of space exploration were expressed in his reply to Sister Mary. It remains, more than four decades later, an eloquent statement of the value of the space exploration endeavor. Born in Germany in 1913, Dr. Stuhlinger received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Tuebingen in 1936. He was a member of the German rocket development team at Peenemünde, and came to the United States in 1946 to work for the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. He moved to Huntsville in…

If you drive away with it, I won’t have it any more, which is a real hassle.

Please don’t steal my identity or my reputation either. Neither travels well, and all the time you’re using it, you’re degrading something that belongs to me.

But my ideas? Sure, yes, please, by all means, take them.

The scarcity underlying the industrial economy (what’s not yours is mine) has pushed us to make a mistake about ideas. If everyone in town comes to my plant and takes a free sample of what I make, I’ll go bankrupt. But if everyone in the world takes a free sample of one of my ideas (or at least one of my good ones), we’ll all get richer.

I got an email from a reader last week. She was spitting angry at another blogger and wanted me to lower the…